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Friday, August 6, 2010

Morbid Anatomy Library New Arrival: "The Dead," Jack Burman, 2010

He shoots in concentration camps, sterile medical laboratories, crumbling archives, curious private collections. He notes that about 90% of his work is done in the Catholic world, places “richly fixated on the body of Mary, the body of Christ, the bodies of the martyrs” and with a “history of sensually violent and death-riddled art.” It’s a tradition that doesn’t exist in North America, and his book serves as a reminder of “everything we left; everything that made us, and somehow drove us to undo that and make ourselves over.--"Jack Burman: Book of the Dead," The Canadian National Post

Canadian photographer Jack Burman's new book--titled, simply, The Dead--is a breathtaking book. Gorgeously produced and sober, this quiet and lovely book is filled with Burman's large-scale photographs exploring the topic of death via a meditative documentation of a variety of human remains. Many of the 52 images which make up this book picture artifacts--from specimens to mummies to medical preparations--that will be familiar to aficionados of medical museums and ossuaries, but the quiet restraint and rich detail Burman achieves in his classically composed images elevate the book above the usual fare.

The book is published by The Magenta Foundation; you can find out more about it--and purchase the book in one of its three editions--by clicking here. You can also come pay the book a visit in the Morbid Anatomy Library where my copy resides atop the New Arrivals pile. You can read more about the book in the recent Canadian National Post article quoted above by clicking here.